I’ve got Lutris on my Steam Deck and it works great! Mostly. I’ve got a few games where the controller just won’t be recognized by the game, and I’m wondering what the expected solution is, or if I’ve wandered into a bug.
I have several games that do this, but for the sake of this case we’ll refer to the game Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, from GoG, installed via Lutris, which is a Linux native game that uses the Lutris “Linux” runner.
When I launch the game via it’s Steam shortcut, which uses the shortcut to launch Lutris with the correct gameid, no controller appears to the game, either the builtin Deck controller or an external bluetooth controller. The game actually has a “connected controllers” list, and it shows none.
If I launch the game via Lutris in Desktop mode the built-in controller works great, however the “Connected Gamepads” link shows None, and all the hints are “Enter”, “Escape”, etc.
However if I create a non-steam-game shortcut in steam and link directly to the start.sh script lutris creates for the game, launching the game via steam works great, the game recognizes the gamepads and shows them AS gamepads with the correct shortcuts and everything.
So I’m not sure what the “correct” solution is here. It isn’t a global issue as there are other games (Wizard of Legend for one) which are linux native games from gog installed via Lutris and their automatically created steam shortcut works perfectly and the game recognizes multiple gamepads perfectly.
I feel like there are two possible solutions:
- Lutris is doing something incorrect about passing controllers to games in certain cases
- Lutris should have a per-game option to generate a shortcut directly to the game if it’s a linux runner game and possibly default to that?
I’ve used two example games one that doesn’t work and one that does, but I’ve got a number of games that are following this exact pattern. I suppose it could be something in the GoG scripts for the specific games as well, but my various searches haven’t hinted at anything that might be a problem there.
I’d love to know what to do to fix this, or even what sort of data I could gather to help submit a proper bug report. At the moment it appears that random games work or don’t work, inside the “GoG games using the Linux Runner” set. (A game either works or doesn’t, to do be clear, not that some runs of the same game work and some don’t)